MoP Beta resto changes from latest build

So, they pushed out a new build last night. The mmo-champion patch notes aren’t particularly helpful for figuring out what the changes actually were for resto druids this build.

Barkskin/Ironbark

First, I have BOTH Barkskin & Ironbark on my bar as a resto druid. So, the text change on Ironbark was intentional to not let you have both up at the same time. Right now, they don’t share a cooldown at all (you can have both up), but I believe that’s just a bug. So, we’ll have to wait and see how that mechanic shapes up in later builds. At the very least, barkskin wasn’t on my bar last build, and now it is back.

Mushroom Changes

As of the latest beta build, they changed how shrooms are placed. This change applies to both the resto & moonkin versions of the spell. The old version required us to click a button and then use the mouse to target the ground to place each shroom. This looked something like:

press-click-press-click-press-click + Detonate

In beta, the shrooms button now has 3 charges. While you have charges active, your targeting circle will remain active and you can keep clicking to get more shrooms placed. The targeting circle no longer disappears as soon as you drop a single shroom (unless you only had one shroom charge, and then it goes away when you hit zero charges). So, in beta, if you have 3 charges active, this looks something like:

Press-click-click-click + detonate

The charges respawn fairly quickly (looks like one every second when you hit 0 shrooms, since there is a new charge that comes up right after your GCD ends for your last shroom placement. It respawns every ~2 or 3 seconds when you have 1 or more charges – the respawn rate feels about right for making sure you can drop 3 but have access to more quickly if things screwed up).

Taking out the two extra button presses makes the spell placement much less awkward. As someone who runs moonkin in raids a lot these days, I definitely appreciate the change to placement.

However, for resto druids, this doesn’t negate some of the other huge problems with the spell I talked about in the last post (namely, 6 yards is half the radius of the newly increased Healing Rain’s circle which looks like it is now 12 yards in beta, the best we could test. You can’t see where the shrooms are going to heal because the targeting circle & graphic are still significantly smaller than the heal effect). At the very least, an increased radius (8 to 10 yards) along with a graphic that better matches the size of the radius (so you know where you placed it and where to stand to get healed) is still really needed to make the healing shroom spell viable.

17 comments on “MoP Beta resto changes from latest build”

they probably feel that the radius is off set by the fact you can position srooms where you want.. but saying that extending the raidus is one of those “reasonable suggestions i see no reason not to grant.

This is good news aobout the mushroom placement.. they suddenly became a lot more fun.

btw.. does casing another spell cancel the targetting reticule or the charges? it would be good if i could click on mushrooms, place one, then do a hurricane or a starfire or continue monuking then place the other two without needing to re-click the button.

I didn’t feel the need to talk about HOTW, since the mmo-champion tooltip seems to reflect what the talent looks like in-game. Since we can’t hit level 90 yet, we can’t test the ability, and the changes didn’t make the talent any better – it just clarifies what it is supposed to do.

Unfortunately, I juts see Mushrooms as a gimmick, and really nothing more than a glorified totem. IMO, Blizzard should be giving Shamans these functions to totems and stop giving totems to other classes. The reason people don’t play shammies is because we don’t like the totem mechanic.

Gimmick spells should NOT be tied to core toolkit functionality, which is what burst AoE healing is for us. I understand Blizzard wants our AoE heals to be more thinky, but Wild Mushrooms, in its current incarnation is not the answer.

If I were to have to deal with Wild Mushroom/Bloom, I’d one one big mushroom. It would work like Freya’s mushroom, where people have to run under it: you plant it, upon “detonate” the shroom grows – maybe some pulses of HoT. When the shroom hits maximum height (and can “umbrella” the raid) it detonates doing the burst AoE portion of the heal (or maybe releases “shielding spores” – if Priests can have a spec that is more “HoT-Centric” then Druids can have a Barrier). In this way, you have the healer responsible for anticipating the need for the aoe heal and the rest of the raid responsible for being in range.

Frankly, no matter what Blizzard does, Wild Mushroom’s effectiveness is contingent on someone other than the healer, which stinks since our effectiveness and efficiency is dictated by the inactions of others. Even the current model can’t help if ranged keeps running away from the mushrooms, and right now the mushrooms are too small for ranged to easily find them. In 10-mans, where ranged is spread out too far for any mushroom’s current area of effect (or any other reasonable area), mushrooms will only be used for melee or clump phases, which makes mushrooms very situational. Situational spells should NOT be the answer to gaps in our toolkit. They should be augments.

Ultimately, I question the effectiveness of this mechanic – we can barely get people to click lightwell, and that is a real simple mechanic for most raiders. And raiders consistently ignore efflorescence. How on earth are we to expect players to run to a mushroom? If healing is going to remain as hectic as it is, I simply don’t have the time, or the inclination, to chase down players who get out of range of my mushrooms. If that makes me a bad Tree, so be it. I’ll figure out other ways to keep them healed. I have no patience for mechanics that waste my time.

IMO, Wild Mushrooms is a talent – a quaint, gimmicky spell that should be an option. Let me choose between WM and FoN and give me an AoE burst heal that I can control. How about playing with ToL forms – like how chakra changes depending on which spell is cast before chakra is activated – with little tree maybe boosting HoTs, Big soulpatch tree gives buffs to direct heals (and can fill in the need for a single-target nuke heal, so maybe HT gets a 200% buff BUT the same player can’t benefit from the mega-HT for x amount of time) and those guardian trees act like a damage buffer for people clumping? That gives us multiple SHAPESHIFT forms, and makes us have to think about the tree form to use for the healing we need to do and the Tree form becomes the method of managing single target nukes and AoE burst heals.

I also think that moving mushrooms to be a talent solves another problem – too many healing tiers, and too many healing talents that are being used to minmax out rotations. Talents are supposed to be options, not requirements. Many of our current talents function as required abilities. If you turn the FoN talent tier into a “reticule” tier, then you add diversity to the talent tree. Maybe Guardian shrooms acts as a md and Feral shrooms act as a cc slow (suppression shrooms? ;)) All you’d need to do then is fill in the third reticule option.Maybe lashers? But I’m going off-topic.

tl:dnr – I think shrooms are pretty situational. Either make one giant shroom that provides the AoE heal on detonate or, better yet, use our tree form to provide us with multiple shapes and healing abilities connected with those shapes and make mushrooms a talent since we have too many healing tiers anyway.

PS: I do want to state though, that I have nothing but respect for Moonkins who can effectively use Mushrooms. I tried adding shrooms to my rotation and my DPS halved. I really only use shrooms now on Anzu fights or in BRD or Stratt when I’m locked out of spells by mobs who shouldn’t be able to hit me. I think shrooms can be of use, but I think that not everyone is going to be able to use them well, no matter what Blizzard does with them.

On my raid team the only ones who seem to be aware of health bars (whether of others or even their own) are the healers and the tanks. We regularly have situations where dps die and they didn’t realize they had a debuff / stood in the fire / etc. One dps guy in particular will, after dying mid fight, call out for a brez, completely oblivious to the fact that we just used it a minute ago on someone else.

I think the “problem” with healing abilities like lightwell, efflor, or the new shrooms, ones that require some else’s cooperation to use, isn’t with the spell design itself. The real problem is a player (mostly dps classes in my experience) awareness issue. I don’t mind having abilities that require coordination with others to work. It makes the game more interesting, and hopefully requires people to have less tunnel vision to win.

Lightwell & the monk statues require more active clicking. In most cases, shrooms would be great for fights like Ultraxion where everyone stands in one place for a least 3 seconds for you to drop & bloom under their feet, lol.

Also thinking about heroic Zonozz when we have our kitty druid running so far away from the group during the blackout phase to kill his add. It could be nice to place 3 shrooms at his spot before the pull, then trigger them during that phase when he’s taking high damage.

Caster Charge has a new animation, which is removed from Tree entirely, and occasionally it is using front flip animation of the nightelf. I just hope that “occasionally” is a bug and it will be changed to “always”.

In PvP you really want more control about when you want to utilize the “bloom” from Lifebloom. It’s part of the reason why on Live servers that we don’t take the talent that currently refreshes Lifebloom for PvP. This is wonderful for PvP Druids. The target swap glyph will also be very beneficial as well.

The addition of Barkskin in our spellbook has me puzzled, specifically because Ironbark can already be cast on ourselves as well as other people. Sure Barkskin can be cast while stunned, but Ironbark could as well through a small spell modification or even through a glyph. As long as they share a CD I see this as a rather pointless change.

Now I wouldn’t mind seeing this happen:

1. Remove the shared CD from Barkskin and Ironbark.

in exchange:

2. Have Ironbark no longer be self-castable.

This gives us access to our old personal survival CD without losing our single target damage reduction CD. It also doesn’t make us OP for PvP because we would still only have 1 damage reduction cooldown for ourselves.

For barkskin/ironbark, it would make the most sense if using one activated a 12 second cooldown on the other to prevent you from being able to have both active at the same time. Sharing a 1 to 2 min cooldown would make having barkskin back kind of unhelpful.

Even then there’s really no reason to not have access to both when we need them. Holy Paladins have a self cooldown and their targetable damage reduction cd available at the same time. I see no reason why we can’t have the same.

I agree. If they share a CD, it doesn’t make sense to have two spells, since they essentially do the exact same thing. Seems like if they’re going to give us two spells they should be usable, if not simultaneously then at least shortly after the effect of one or the other expires.